Target: Underground

Target Stores Inc. (Minneapolis) has opened a 153,000-square-foot store in a New York-area mixed-use development, becoming the first retailer to open for business in the City Center at White Plains (N.Y.).

The new $320 million retail-residential complex will also include a Circuit City, a 15-screen National Amusements movie theater, a Barnes & Noble bookstore, several restaurants and two 35-story residential towers.

Circuit City will open its 38,000-square-foot consumer electronics store tomorrow, using a new design that features “more dramatic lighting, increased signage and most of the stock on the selling floor as opposed to in the warehouse,” according to a company spokesman. Barnes & Noble, which is taking 27,000 square feet, will open during the winter. The rental office for the first apartment tower is scheduled to open early next year.

It is Target's initial foray into suburban Westchester County, its first outlet in a residential-retail complex and its first store below street level. Usually the retailer, which has more than 1200 stores in 47 states, locates in one-level freestanding stores in a community or regional shopping area.

A vertical retail format, as opposed to the more traditional horizontally structured mall, is increasingly being seen in metropolitan areas where land is at a premium, according to Mark Schulman, a partner in Street-Works, the White Plains architectural firm responsible for the overall design of the City Center complex. “The value of dirt today is often such that it requires us to put this kind of density on a site, with co-anchors on the bottom and top floors instead of across the way from each other,” he told The New York Times.

The complex occupies most of a city block, on land where a Macy's department store once stood. Macy's moved from one corner of Main Street and Mamaroneck Avenue in the mid-1990's to the Galleria at White Plains, a mall across the street. This past summer, Sears Roebuck left the 270,000-square-foot freestanding store it had occupied nearby for 37 years to join Macy's as a co-anchor in the Galleria.

The new leaseholders of the former Sears building say they are spending $17 million to redevelop it and are looking for several retailers to occupy the site.